F&ES 767b / 2018-2019

Building a Conservation Toolkit: From Project Design to Evaluation

Credits: 3

Spring 2019: W, 5:40-8:30, Kroon 321

As wildlife and wildland conservation programs have multiplied and grown in size, conservation organizations have sought methods to improve strategic project planning, assessment of progress, cross-project comparison, learning of lessons, and transparency for donors. To address these challenges, major nonprofit organizations have collaboratively designed a set of decision-support tools for planning field projects and programs and for monitoring their progress, summarized in the “Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation” (http://cmp-openstandards.org). Use of these tools has allowed organizations to more clearly articulate strategies, define priority actions, critically assess success, manage adaptively, and derive lessons—all of which help to improve effectiveness and respond to donor interests. Students in this course explore a mutually reinforcing suite of these project tools: their underlying principles are introduced, students practice the techniques, and current case studies from field conservation are examined to explore tool utility. Students synthesize use of these design tools in a final project or program proposal focused on a single case study of their choice. The suite of decision-support tools covered includes conceptual models for project design, situational and stakeholder assessments, threats and opportunities analysis, conservation target identification (particularly landscape species selection), and monitoring frameworks. Students gain experience in design of projects and their monitoring, as well as familiarity with budgeting. Enrollment limited to twelve.
Limited to 12